


with silver tongue

by perkalowy (Mikkeneko)



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Adultery, Banter, Friends With Benefits, Humor, Jaskier is an ethical slut, M/M, Promiscuity, canon-typical philandering, lots of discussion of sex but nobody onscreen has any, sexy bickering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:15:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25291525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikkeneko/pseuds/perkalowy
Summary: Geralt poured water out of his boots, wrung out his hair, and watched Jaskier try and utterly fail to build a firebase out of wet wood. He wanted to be furiously angry, but this had become so much the fabric of his life now that he couldn't move much past 'furiously resigned.' It had only been on Jaskier's sufferance that the manor guestroom had been on the table in the first place; what Jaskier's silver tongue gave, Jaskier's silver tongue also took away.--After a close call with yet another angry husband, Geralt demands an accounting from Jaskier about his ridiculous sex life. He gets one.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 38
Kudos: 335





	with silver tongue

The day had been going so well, and then Jaskier happened. 

This corner of Kaedwen was sparsely populated, the people here nearly outnumbered by sheep. But a clutch of endrega had hatched in the rocky ravines upriver. It was fortunate that Geralt had happened by the valley early enough in the season to catch the colony before they dug in and began to breed, and the people had mustered enough payment for it to almost have been worth it.

Unfortunately -- payment or no payment -- the valley was simply too out of the way of major routes and the village too small to justify the presence of an inn. There was no common house where he could claim a room or even a bunk, and no peasant family was willing to admit a strange man -- let alone a witcher -- into their cottages.

Geralt would have accepted that, would have bedded down on the green or under the trees like he had a hundred other nights -- but then there was Jaskier. Jaskier, who bitched about the prospect of having to sleep out among the insects and cowpats when civilization was so near at hand. Jaskier, who'd dragged him up the hill to the manor house that overlooked the whole valley; Jaskier, who'd managed to sweet-talk the local baron into opening his doors and letting them stay at the manor for the night.

Even as the baron stood in the courtyard and gave them a droning speech of welcome and gratitude for their service (Geralt's service, that was, not that Jaskier had contributed anything but color commentary to the whole tedious bug-squashing business) he caught sight of several middle-aged ladies in bright colors gathered against the inner wall of the keep, gesturing towards Jaskier and giggling among themselves.

He really,  _ really _ should have expected what would happen next; but he'd been tired, surprised and grateful at the prospect of getting to sleep in a real bed after all, and he'd let Jaskier out of his sight for half an hour after dinner and apparently that had been  _ long enough. _

And then there was the usual production of outraged male shouting, and intrigued female giggling, and Jaskier bursting into his room carrying his shoes in one hand and his hat in the other with his trousers undone. And the usual business of scrambling out the window and bolting for the postern gate, and Geralt had of course gone back for Roach, and then there were pursuing hoofbeats and barking hounds and Geralt was not about to kill some poor damn innocent animals over Jaskier's idiocy so he dragged them both through the river for half a mile until he was sure the dogs had lost their scent, and then they found themselves tucked up in a dry gully up in the hills getting ready for a cold and unpleasantly damp night while the sounds of pursuit faded away below them.

Geralt poured water out of his boots, wrung out his hair, and watched Jaskier try and utterly fail to build a firebase out of wet wood. He wanted to be furiously angry; if this had happened five years ago, two, he would have been. But this had become so much the fabric of his life now that he couldn't move much past 'furiously resigned.' It had only been on Jaskier's sufferance that the manor guestroom had been on the table in the first place; what Jaskier's silver tongue gave, Jaskier's silver tongue also took away.

Jaskier gave up on the fire and came over to stand before Geralt; he let out a theatrical sigh, before an even more theatrical flop down onto the relatively dry ground in front of Geralt. "Well, go on then," he said. "Say it."

Geralt thought of a lot of things he might say, and also thought about going back to the river to dunk Jaskier's head under the water again; but what he eventually chose to say, instead, was: " _ Why?" _

Jaskier put a hand on his chest as though in response to a mortal wound. "Why?" he gasped. "Because I believe in  _ free love _ Geralt!" he said.

"Horseshit," Geralt said. "Steaming, reeking horseshit, Jaskier."

"I do!" Jaskier insisted. "People were put on this world to  _ enjoy _ each other. There's something about the beautiful and holy union between a man and a woman -- or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, or a man and a woman and another man, or a man, two women and a dragon --"

"I will absolutely smother you in your sleep."

Jaskier sniffed his displeasure. "What two -- or whatever -- consenting adults choose to do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is nobody else's business," he said.

"Except the husbands whose bedrooms it actually is."

"Well that's just a technicality," Jaskier said. "Yes, all right, the continent is still consumed with backwards social mores that tie people down into miserable relationships that satisfy neither of them because our society fetishizes noble suffering. That being said, it's not  _ actually illegal _ to sleep with someone who's married -- just scandalous. And what is scandal but entertainment -- and therefore art -- of another color?"

Geralt shook his head in disbelief. Horseshit didn't even cover it any more; he needed something bigger, steamier and more pungent. Endrega shit, maybe. _Kikimora._ Another thought occurred. "It is in Creyden," he said.

"What?" Jaskier said. During the lull in the conversation he had started trying to untangle the wet and crusted laces of his doublet, a task that took up most of the attention even when they weren't hopelessly soaked and tangled.

"Adultery's illegal in Creyden," Geralt said. "First offense's a branding, second's a hanging. Drawing and quartering included free."

Jaskier huffed. "Creyden is a terrible, barbaric, backwards little nation," he said. "And anyway, I'm not from Creyden. I'm Redanian."

"Yes, but  _ you still sleep with married people in Creyden," _ Geralt pointed out. "You were saying it's not against the law. Well, it is in Creyden."

"To disobey an unjust law is  _ itself  _ just," Jaskier declaimed regally, and then undercut this a bit by adding spitefully, "And besides, I don't see  _ you _ giving up your swords when passing through Aedirn."

Geralt frowned. "What's Aedirn got to do with it?"

"It is contrary to the law in Aedirn to bear an unlicensed weapon," Jaskier recited. "But there you go, traipsing about the countryside with those great hulking swords strapped to your back and _no license_ in sight. You are every much the lawbreaker as you claim I am!"

"I never said I wasn't," Geralt said. "I'm not from Aedirn and neither are my weapons, so what the hell do I care about their regulations?"

"You don't! Nor should you," Jaskier said triumphantly. "My point well proven!"

"What  _ goddamn point?" _

"The  _ point _ is that sometimes we have to obey a  _ higher calling," _ Jaskier said piously. "You don't let yourself be bothered by silly little local finagles, and neither do I."

"My higher calling is to stop people getting eaten by monsters," Geralt said. "Yours is to dip your dick in every honeycomb to cross your path. I don't think that's comparable."

Jaskier huffed. "I wouldn't expect you to understand," he said. "It's about  _ love _ Geralt,  _ free love --" _

"So you said," Geralt interrupted wearily. "Several times. And anyway, that's not even the right question. I know why  _ you _ do what you do. I know better than to expect otherwise of you, any more than I'd expect a wyvern to go vegetarian. That's not what I'm asking."

"What, then?" Jaskier said.

"Why do  _ they _ do it?" Geralt's broad, vague gesture encompassed half the Continent and the female population thereof. "Why -- what even is the appeal? Why take all the risk and trouble? It can't help but result in trouble and grief in the end."

"In the end, what doesn't?" Jaskier asked rhetorically. "Besides, I usually  _ do  _ try to arrange things so that I'm the only one taking on risk.  _ I _ don't press myself on anyone; if a fair lady decides to approach me, then that is entirely on her own recognizance. Presumably they know their husbands better than I do; if they feared that outraged tempers would fall back on their heads, then they wouldn't take the risk in the first place. Or, at the very least," he added in the spirit of fairness, "they think it's worth the reward. Women are surprisingly willing to take risks if there's a guaranteed payoff."

"What  _ payoff?" _ Geralt demanded. "That's what I don't get out of all this. You're not that damned good-looking."

Jaskier mock-gasped, staggered back with a dramatic hand over his heart. "Slander and insults! From my own bosom companion!" he cried. "What do you know of it, you aren't even in the target audience!"

"You're pretty enough," Geralt said dismissively, "but not  _ that _ pretty. I've seen you naked, bard. Wasn't too much to remark on."

"Well, not in contrast to some," Jaskier allowed, glancing down at Geralt's lap and then pointedly away. "This  _ may _ come as a surprise to you, mighty Witcher, but women care a lot less about that sort of thing than you'd think. The size of the instrument matters much less than your skill at using it. It's really mostly men who obsess over the size of their pricks, comparing this one to that and boasting to upsell the size of their package. Not that I've had any complaints from that quarter, either."

It took Geralt a moment to unravel the innuendo in that one, even accustomed as he was to Jaskier's bragging and double-talk. "Wait, you  _ also _ fuck men?" he exclaimed. The mind  _ boggled. _

Jaskier shrugged. "On occasion," he said, "but the pool of likelies is smaller, the risk is greater, and no matter how many beautiful peacocks you see cluttering up any given court, you just  _ know _ that the sex is going to be so bad." He sighed in sincere regret.

"Why?" Geralt managed, though he was honestly mostly caught out by the news of Jaskier putting notches on both sides of his belt, apparently. He wasn't sure why he was surprised, really; Jaskier was so shameless in his pursuit of pleasure (pursuit of  _ joy, _ Geralt, Jaskier would have chided him) that he was never too particular where it led him. Of course, Jaskier enjoyed the company of both kinds. Or didn't, apparently? "Wait, why?"

"Do you know," Jaskier said reflectively, "how many noble men manage to reach the age of maturity without ever getting any good at sex? Truly, horrendously  _ bad _ at it, most of the time! You'll get some lovely young lad with impeccable wardrobe and perfectly groomed hair, and then find out their idea of fucking is akin to setting a fencepost. The problem is the lack of criticism, I expect. They're surrounded all their lives by people who fear to give them anything but false praise, and that carries over to their sex partners as well. How can you hope to improve at  _ any _ art if you don't even know how bad you are starting out?"

"Huh," Geralt said. He supposed it made sense, not that he could testify personally. "Don't these people ever go to prostitutes? Their whole job is sex, you'd think they could give some advice."

"Certainly, certainly," Jaskier said dismissively. "But the ladies-of-the-night are professionals, you know; their living depends on happy customers. No prostitute in the world has ever grown her client base by telling them they are bad at sex."

"Actually, I knew this one woman in Vizima --"

"The exception that proves the rule, Witcher," Jaskier interrupted him firmly. "And also next time we're in Vizima I want that address."

Geralt smirked, but made no promises. 

"The point is," Jaskier continued. "The point _is,_ your typical noble lady gets locked from a young age into a marriage with a man who never gets any good at sex, and she ends up frustrated and bored and unsatisfied. It's a pandemic! Is it really any surprise that they'd jump at a chance to experience an orgasm at least once in their lives?"

Geralt scoffed. 

"And women talk, you know," Jaskier said blithely. "The greatest intelligence network in the world hasn't a patch on women with good gossip to dish to each other. News spreads. I have  _ testimonials." _

In the face of this shameless braggadocio Geralt kept hold of his doubt. "You can't possibly be  that good. Nobody's _that_ good."

"Well," Jaskier said modestly. "I _am_ a trained bard."

"What does that have to do with it?" Geralt demanded. 

"Are you sure you really want to know?" Jaskier said in all sincerity. "Once you know, you might find yourself thinking about it. Are you absolutely sure that's suffering you want to invite?"

Geralt raised his palms in the air in exasperation. "It seems I'm going to suffer for it whether I ask or not!" he said; the events of the last afternoon only one in a long line of misadventures caused by Jaskier's wandering cock. "So yes, I want to know!"

Jaskier smirked, and began to tick items off on his fingers. "Very well. One: Excellent breath control, always popular to demonstrate at parties."

Geralt was not impressed. "I can hold my breath for longer."

"Remember that whole discussion about how only men care about dick-measuring, Geralt? Anyway, breath control. Two: Advanced dexterity in the digits." He held his hands up in the air, letting his fingers fall in waves as though practicing scales. "Extremely handy for finding small targets and exploring in dark places, if you take my meaning --"

"Vividly, thanks."

"Number three..." He gave Geralt a smile that managed, by the slow passage of a tonguetip from one corner of his lips to the other, to be the single filthiest thing Geralt had ever seen outside of a very particular brothel in Vizima. "The woodwinds are hardly my favorite class of instruments but I  _ did _ have to master them to pass my exams, and the endurance and dexterity that builds in the small muscles of the lips and tongue.  _ Silver _ tongued, satisfied partners have said."

Geralt thought part of his brain might have fused, just then. "I always thought that was just because of how good you were at spinning bullshit."

"Depends entirely on who you ask. Four: Rote memorization of reams of poetry from the most tender lyricists of Toussaint to the raunchiest limericks of Skellige and the discernment to know which is desired by any particular audience. Five, lots and lots and  _ lots  _ of chances to practice and improve my craft from the halls of Oxenfurt, with other students of the bardic arts who have  _ no _ lack of creativity for new positions to try and caustic criticism to spare if you aren't holding up your end of the duet --"

"All right!" Geralt interrupted, flinging up a hand to stem the flow of words. He took a moment to be grateful for the mutagens that spared him what would, just then, have been an extremely revealing flush. "I get the picture. Bards are accomplished sluts, you've convinced me." 

"And years and years of experience since then," Jaskier finished. "Well, Witcher, is your curiosity satisfied now?"

"I regret ever asking, so yes," Geralt groaned. 

The sun had vanished behind the ridge as they'd talked, and the last of the light faded from the sky as they finished a cold dinner and began to settle in for the night. Geralt was thankful that his bedroll was good tight-woven wool, which would stay warm even when damp; it would have been a miserable night otherwise.

It looked like it might be a miserable night, anyway. Sleep eluded him; Geralt lay awake, staring up at the darkening sky -- the moon was near new, providing only a splinter of light -- and thought about it. Could not, in fact, _stop_ thinking about it.

It wasn't like he'd _never_ considered it before. He was a mutant, he wasn't _dead._ And there were long stretches of time spent in Jaskier's company with little else to do but stare at the other man and let his thoughts wander. The bard had very good hands, fine hands with strong fingers and well-kept nails, sure and steady and competent whether scratching with a quill in his notebook or dancing over the fretboard of his lute or picking locks on a graveyard gate in the dead of night. And it would have taken a stronger man than Geralt to not listen to Jaskier's chatter for hours on end -- didn't the man's voice ever get _tired? --_ and fantasize at least idly about shutting him up with a cock in his mouth.

But the evening's conversation had tipped his thoughts well over the line from idle speculation into very active, very vivid _imagination._ To take the old familiar visuals of his friend's mouth and hands and -- well, after a lecture like that one, what was he _supposed_ to be thinking of? What else could _possibly_ present itself to his thoughts if not an image of Jaskier sinking to his knees before him, lips twisted in that oh-so-familiar smirk, big mouth stretching wide and cheeks hollowing to swallow him down, tongue dancing over the head of Geralt's cock with as much fine control as he used to twist his words? How was he supposed to ignore the sudden temptation to put Jaskier's _breath control_ to the test, pushing him down on his cock just to see how long he'd be willing to stay down there?

And those _hands_. Jaskier touched him all the time, anyway. He knew what those hands felt like pressed against his shoulder, brushing through his hair, trailing up his leg whether he wanted to or _not._ It was too short of a gap not to picture them up a little further, tracing the line up the inside of his thigh and wrapping with perfect confidence around his cock, pressing just hard enough in all the right places. Those same fingers pressing inside him -- _handy for finding small targets in dark places,_ fuck you very much, Jaskier -- and crooking just _so,_ scratching an itch that Geralt had let lie fallow for decades without missing it and now, wrapped in a miserable dark blanket on the rocky ground under the night sky he was fucking _squirming_ for it --

From over in the darkness beside him he heard a familiar snicker. "You're thinking about it, aren't you?"

_"Dammit,"_ Geralt groaned in frustration.

"I did warn you." He heard the rustling of wool, the whisper of fabric and skin as Jaskier sat up. He could see in the dark rather better than most humans; but he didn't even need to look to know that Jaskier was grinning. It hung in his voice as he said, "Would you like a practical demonstration?"

"Fuck," Geralt grumbled. He threw back his own coverlet and rolled over onto his side, towards Jaskier. "Dammit. Shit. Yes."

In the faint moonlight and even fainter starlight, Jaskier gave an example of exactly how silver his tongue was.

* * *

Sometime around midnight, Geralt had to concede that the boasting was indeed well founded. But just to be sure, he asked for another demonstration again at dawn.

~fin.

**Author's Note:**

> So, the inspiration for writing this fic is somewhat complicated and rather stupid, but it all goes back to Loki. 
> 
> No, not that Loki; the other Loki, Loki of antiquity. One of the things you find out when you read some of the old poems (particularly the Lokasenna, which is kind of the big one involving that character) is that Loki got around. Like, he really got around. He was pretty strongly implied to have slept with basically every female goddess in Asgard, even the married ones; or one might say, especially the married ones.
> 
> Now -- approaching this from the perspective that women have a actual agency in their sex lives and are not merely passive targets of male attention, since that's not a narrative I find particularly interesting to dwell on -- this implies that there has to be something very compelling about Loki that would tempt even the married goddesses to sleep with him despite his many _many_ other flaws. Sleeping with Loki is a bad idea. Everybody in Asgard knows it's a bad idea. But they did it anyway. Why?
> 
> Okay, so he was probably pretty. Sure. But some of the other gods were pretty damn good-looking, too; Frey (the twin brother of Freya) was reputedly quite a catch, and Baldur was everybody's favorite pretty boy. (Thor does not make this list, interestingly enough, despite his status as a sometimes-fertility god.) But none of them managed a bingo card of every married woman in Asgard. So. What set Loki apart from the other gods, that would entice women to want to take a crack at him despite literally everything else about Loki?
> 
> I thought it very interesting that one of Loki's epithets is _silvertongue._
> 
> And so, I concluded, Loki must have been _really good_ at oral sex, in a community where absolutely none of the other men had any idea what their tongues were for. And so that headcanon got passed down to Jaskier, who has also landed the title of memetic sex god for whom all the married ladies open up their secret _chiffoniers,_ who is also pretty but c'mon not _that_ pretty, and who is also -- probably -- pretty damn good with his tongue.


End file.
